Nerd Do Well Chronicles Simon Pegg’s Leap to Top of Geek Heap

Simon Pegg writes about his ascent to the upper echelons of geek culture in his autobiography Nerd Do Well.

Simon Pegg shouldn’t be famous. He’s the kind of goofy nerd who in his youth would kiss a picture of Carrie Fisher each night before going to bed — not the kind of guy that Hollywood executives would put in the “highly bankable” column.

At least that’s what his quirky and inspiring new autobiography Nerd Do Well would lead you to believe. (Seriously, there’s a section that claims most articles about him start similarly to the above — Wired.com is just following form).

But, truth be told, nerds are huge right now and Pegg happened to grow up in the generation that would take geekiness from the fringes of culture right into the mainstream.

Thus he’s a nerd hero — a member of the geekerati.

In the just-released book, the writer and star of everything from Shaun of the Dead to Paul traces his early forays into nerdia as a kid growing up in England (discovering a love of theater as well as Star Trek). He talks about how those passions eventually lead him to travel in the circles of the geeks he admired (like starring in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot!).

Wired.com: With Nerd Do Well you managed to avoid a lot of the trappings of the traditional celebrity autobiography. How’d you manage to do that?

Simon Pegg: That’s what I didn’t want to do. The idea of writing something that was just, you know, standard didn’t interest me and made me feel a little bit ill. It’s that thing of like assuming that people want to know about you makes me feel uncomfortable, which is why I drifted away from writing anecdotal stories about work and just tried to come up with something a bit more relatable. There’s plenty of these memoirs that come out every year and they’re not written by the people they’re about and they’re just chronologies of the mundane, and I didn’t want to write that.

Simon Pegg Photo: Casey Moore

Wired.com: And so many of them are ghostwritten, which yours is clearly not because it’s in your voice.

Pegg: I was surprised finding out how many of them are ghostwritten and I felt quite smug about the fact that I’d written mine.

Wired.com: Parts of the book are written as a fictionalized version of your life where you are essentially playing a James Bond-like character. Was that your script-writing coming to the forefront?

Pegg: That stuff wrote itself. I regarded that as taking a break from the actual book, because I really loved writing those chapters. I was initially writing them to make Ben [Dunn], my editor, laugh. It would really tickle him.

There are some jokes in there that relate to ridiculous private jokes between me and him about other authors. The thing about the small swimming pool relates to someone else he looks after whose house he went to and found out they had a tiny pool.

Those chapters were just something that every now and then, when my brain was hurting from having to recall so much detail from my past, I could just sort of check out from reality and write that nonsense. It’s fun to try to write badly and wield language like a psychopath with a chainsaw. It was much more fun than telling stories from my youth.

Wired.com: It also seemed to allow you to be self-deprecating about the entire concept of writing an autobiography.

‘It’s fun to try to write badly and wield language like a psychopath with a chainsaw.’

Pegg: Exactly. It was an opportunity to undermine the whole. By being so awkwardly self-aggrandizing, it was showing that I was aware that the whole thing was itself self-aggrandizing.

Wired.com: The book is, essentially, about a geeky kid who gets to travel in the circles of his idols, but are there any geek icons you haven’t met yet?

Pegg: Oh yeah. When you start getting away from the more traditionally nerdy people there are people like the Coen brothers and Martin Scorsese that are sort of my film idols [who I haven’t met]. Raising Arizona had a seismic effect on me as a writer and even as an actor. So the Coen brothers would be fantastic to meet up with and work with at some point. Edgar [Wright] has met them. Our paths just haven’t crossed. Or like Martin Scorsese. I sat behind him at the BAFTAs once and I just wanted to touch his head.

Wired.com: These days geeks are cool. Do you take any pride in ushering that wave in?

Pegg: Yes and no. I think Kevin Smith kind of cleared the way for us a bit in enabling people to talk about the minutiae of their likes and dislikes in popular culture as if it was important.

I also think that process is a slightly damaging thing. You know, Patton Oswalt wrote that great article for you guys which was really good and really true. In some ways marketing people have kind of conned onto geek culture as a way to make money.

Also, I think there’s something in our tendency to want to digress to a state of childlike wonder. If you look at all the marquee commodities in cinema, at the moment it’s all superheroes. Yes, it’s nerd stuff but it’s also quite infantile in some respects. I’m sure if I was at university I could write a big essay about capitalism and infantile regression. I think it’s as much about selling something easy to people as it is about the triumph of nerd culture.

Wired.com: Right. It’s like how Super 8 is the only super thing this summer that doesn’t have hero after it.

Pegg: That’s a great example of a smart summer movie. It’s not just about bangs and flashes. It’s a great coming-of-age film. It just happens to have a fantastical element.

Wired.com: Your book also looks into the fate that lead you to meet Nick Frost and Edgar Wright. What do you think your career would look like if you hadn’t met them?

Pegg: God, I don’t know. You could ask, “What would’ve happened if you hadn’t been born?” It’s hard to extrapolate. I could be drinking spirits in the gutter, I don’t know. I say in the book it was something like fate, but far less fanciful. It was the natural magnetism that brings you together with the kind of people who like the same things you like. I was actually trying in the book to compute the idea of fate as something real, not something engineered by some kind of ghost.

Wired.com: Are you and Edgar Wright working on the last chapter of your trilogy after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz? We heard it was called The World’s End.

Pegg: We’re absolutely trying to clear the decks and make some time to do it. I’ve got another movie to make when I get back from the States and hopefully after that we’re going to try and sync up and get working. We’ve had writing sessions already and we’ve got a lot of stuff down and ready to go. I think now that we’ve written a couple of films we can hit the ground running a bit more.

Wired.com: What’s the premise?

I’m not saying a word. I’m now a student of the J.J. Abrams school of keeping secrets.

Wired.com: You and Nick Frost are talking about doing another film, right?

Pegg: Yeah, we had an idea for a movie that that we might do next after The World’s End. There’s not enough hours in the day. By the time we finish all the films we want to make we’re going to be in our 50s. We had a great idea for a sequel to Paul. It was really making us laugh. But if we started to write a sequel to Paul now it wouldn’t be out for another three years. It would have to be the only thing we have to work on and it wouldn’t be.

Wired.com: In the book you lament that your Star Wars crush Carrie Fisher doesn’t follow you on Twitter. Do you hope releasing the book will actually help make that happen?

Pegg: I’d like to get her a copy of the book if I can. I was actually working to do that through John Landis because they worked together on The Blues Brothers. I just don’t want to just send it through her agent and have it end up in a pile of teddy bears and Princess Leia dolls. She’s a great writer as well, so I’d like to be able to speak to her in terms of a fellow writer and not just a fan. But I’ll continue to pursue that Twitter goal.

Wired.com: In the book you’re pretty open about your distaste for the Star Wars prequels. Are you worried about retribution from George Lucas?

Pegg: You mean, like is he going to dispatch some Stormtroopers to shoot me? Um, I don’t know. Typically I’m the kind of person that if I go to the cinema and I see a film I don’t like I won’t say anything. I’m not going to go on my Twitter and say, “Oh I went to see this and I didn’t like it.” I don’t think there’s any point in expressing negativity publicly, because who cares what you think? But in the case of Star Wars I made a slight exception because it can take it. It’s not in any danger. It’s deflector shields are at full power and my little opinions aren’t going to have any effect.

I like to think that in the end of the book what I say about George Lucas is very positive in terms of him being a filmmaker that’s been rendered almost terminally self-reliant and as a result is just untrustworthy of other people. He doesn’t have the joy of collaboration. People won’t say “no” to him. That’s a bit of a shame. And what he said to me about not making the same film again years later was very enlightening and helped me understand him.

There’s a case for all of that disappointment. But at the same time there’s a slight fun in playing it all up because it really doesn’t matter in the end — it’s just a film.

Pegg: I’m very excited about Tintin. I’ve seen a little bit of it and it looks extraordinary and beautiful. I’m pretty ambivalent about 3-D, but when it comes to animation or performance-capture, it’s not so gimmicky. I object to it being something that’s tacked on to live-action films, which don’t need it. When you see the new Harry Potter films are coming out in 3-D, I just think, “Why?”

We live in 3-D, we don’t really need everything to be in 3-D; it’s just a way of charging more money and sort of tricking people in the cinema into wearing stupid glasses. But having got that rant over and done with, I think Tintin will look amazing in it because the visuals are so amazing. It’s true to Hergé‘s original drawings but it’s sort of photorealistic. The more real it can look, the more those visuals will come across. I think it’s going to be a real crowd-pleaser.